I'm not good with numbers and I really don't care what day of the project it is. All I know is that today has been a good day to take stock of where things are at. Positive discussions across the three areas, cinema, console and community, great developments like the first draft of the storyboards, interesting new faces like the tool developer applicants, a good half day, personally, thinking about nothing but the characters and what they're doing mucking about onscreen.
There's a real tendency on this project to forget about the story and get absorbed by the mechanics of putting the production together. Mechanics of the world, the props, the re-mixable film player, the licensing scheme, the patent opportunities.... It's crazy. The only point of doing this thing is story. That was the idea. The film is no use without it being a believable experience. Otherwise it's a badly funded corporate video. Only time will tell if this mix of sysadmin/directing and other stuff is truly useful or a distraction from "the process". Reminder to get a brief from someone who went to film school.
I really need to watch My Dinner with Andre, a feature film of two men sharing a meal at the dinner table. No FX, no virtual world interfaces to design, no confusion between avatars and their owners. Shit... what am I doing?
There is something so exciting about having got to this point and to realise that there is no FILM funding at risk here and no COMPUTER GAME funding at risk either. We've got license to make something new with nothing to lose except a business model. And yet storytelling is as old as the hills. It can't really be a new storytelling process. Can it?
Anyway, the business side is the least of my worries. Balancing an online community and a self-serving individual approach to story-telling is more the challenge. Maybe there will be a fundamental conflict being a company director and a film director at the same time. Fortunately, the story is all about people falling foul of corporate interests. So any horrible incidents *touch wood* will have to work as inspiration.
Posted by .M. at November 3, 2004 01:16 AM